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Happy Darwin Day!
proclus writes "In honor of the day, I have released
some autobiographical material, which forms the background for GNU-Darwin and
some other projects. Alternatively, you can celebrate by joining the Friends of Charles Darwin, or baking some Trilobite Cookies."
To clarify, evolution and the theory of evolution are two different things. If you are talking about evolution, then you are refering to a change in a species over time. This is proven to occur and explains the great variety of different kinds of dogs. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, refers to a theory that claims a species can evolve into into an entirely different species, most noteably, Homo neanderthalensis to Homo sapien. This theory has a great deal of evidence supporting it, and the only reason it is a topic of such controversy is because it contradicts popular interpretations of the worlds most commonly believed in religious texts. If you need to see some of the evidence for yourself, then just look inside you own mouth. Wisdom teeth were once used for the crushing of bones when predatorily feeding on other animals, however, due to the competitive advantages of being a more omnivorous species and the fact that bone provides little sustinance, the wisdom teeth in mankind evolved to be much smaller, and have become a nuisance. Evolution today is much like Galileo's theory that the Earth rotated around the Sun. Like evolution, it was ridiculed by the religious, to the point that Galileo was even persecuted for his beliefs. I expect that evolution will one day be proven, just like Galileo's theory. Evolution will eventually become completely accepted among the general populous, and a new theory will arise to take its place among Religion/Science debates. It should be noted that Science is not the enemy of Religion. Science is simply an attempt at understanding the world around us by using a method involving evidence and proofs. Science has never tried to disprove the existance of a diety, and if a diety does in fact exist, Science should provide evidence supporting that. The utter lack of evidence supporting the existance of a god is what causes people to look at other possibilities. The problem with religion is that it often leads to lazy or inaccurate science. The religious are overly eager to prove thier belief is valid and conclude that anything that cannot be readily explained is an act of God. Over time, this becomes the common belief in a society, and when a theory arises that challenges that belief, the public rejects it. Evolution does not even contradict the Bible, Torah, or Koran, as I understand them, because the order in which the Gods of these texts created life are exactly identical to the order in which life was expected to evolve. Who's to say that God did not create man through the process of evolution? None of these texts describe exactly how Adam was created. The only thing the theory of evolution is guilty of is that it contradicts the commonly held interpretation of these texts.
I would have thought that we could avoid homophobic insults on slashdot. Whatever you think about homosexuality surely calling someone a "fag" as an insult is rather immature. I thought slashdotters were smarter than that.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
the only reason there are no Gravitationists like there are Evolutionists (as you say it), is simply because gravitational theory does not directly contradict people's religious beliefs like the theory of evolution does. Evolutionists are evolutionists because anti-evolutionists call them evolutionists instead of calling them what they call themselves, biologists.
Logic, macros, and more
Correction: some mathematicians Certainly not the majority who actually care to become intimately familiar with the subject.
Two: Evolution has occured irregardless of whether Darwinian theory of the mechanics of evolution are correct. The fossil evidence is massively clear.
Logic, macros, and more
That's because mathematicians aren't biologists.
g bk
It sounds like it's creation that they don't think is possible. For example, the one guy, Murray Eden, apparently claims "...that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data." However that's not true because the entire anotated genetic sequence is downloadable here: http://www.genome.wisc.edu/pub/sequence/U00096.2.
An average strain of E. coli might have 5 million base pairs, each being one of A, C, G, or T, for a total of 10 million bits. This guy was off by 5 orders of magnitude!
And then he presumed that the whole thing had to just appear randomly at once. Clearly that's not possible, but of course that doesn't account for evolution. If the genes mutated at an average of 1 bit per year (quite a meaningless concept), it would take 10 million years to evolve E. coli. The human genome has maybe 3.2 billion base pairs. Sure, that will take a lot longer to evolve than E. coli, but then again bacteria have been around for orders of magnitude longer than we have.
Consider a Pentium 4E: it has over a hundred million transistors switching billions of times per second. If even one transistor switches incorrectly just once, the whole computer can crash! Did somebody just sit down one day and design a Pentium? No, it evolved over the course of decades, with help from each previous generation of CPU. Each generation took parts of the one before and rearranged them and added new stuff.
If Pentiums were just intelligently designed one day, they wouldn't have such a ridiculously convoluted instruction set. However, their instruction set makes sense when you follow the evolution from the 8086 through the 80286, and on. Likewise, humans wouldn't have been intelligently created with an appendix or tonsils -- those only make sense when you look at other animals with similar features and see how they are used. If you saw an ostrich before learning of other birds, wouldn't you wonder what it was doing with wings and feathers?
I must say that the exact mechanics and origin of evolution still elude man, but that's hardly a reason to believe that it all happened due to a higher intelligence.
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